Chart of the week: Instagram’s referral traffic has sky-rocketed

Instagram’s referral traffic has sky-rocketed between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019 as the popular social media site becomes more important for website traffic.

According to recent estimates from Merkle, Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, experienced a 114 per cent increase in web referrals. Facebook and Pinterest both saw modest year-over-year traffic growth. It was not all good news for social media sites; YouTube’s traffic flatlined, despite posting strong gains in mid-2018, while Twitter’s traffic growth shrunk by eight per cent in Q1 2019. Overall, website visits from social media accounted for over four per cent of all site traffic and five per cent of all mobile visits in the first quarter, new highs according to the report.

Instagram has recently made a serious push into the ecommerce and marketing space, by rolling out its tap to shop feature last month. The social network also has experienced a 44 per cent increase in advertising investment in Q1 2019. Overall, Instagram is driving most of the ad investment across all of Facebook’s sites. These developments come on the back of Instagram’s ability to increase in the number of people using the platform, one of the few social networks that have been able to expand usage rates.

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On this week's episode of Media Voices, Wired's editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson talks about the brand's positioning as a tech magazine in a digital world, the impact of two huge Facebook features, lessons learned from Wired's paywall a year on, and what his dream paywall would look like.